


Superior

by bilboswaggins



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Established Relationship, M/M, Mix of comics and cinematic canon, POV Steve Rogers, Protective Steve Rogers, Superior Iron Man, Tony Stark Is A Dick, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, tony ai
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 12:42:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6985618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bilboswaggins/pseuds/bilboswaggins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is very wrong with Tony Stark.</p>
<p>It's slow at first, but gradually his choices are getting worse and worse, until one day he just disappears and Steve is left confused and frustrated. Until he shows up in Los Angeles with a new app that can easily ruin your life. They've been together for years, but now, he won't even answer Steve's calls. He has to do something. Someone has to save Tony from himself.</p>
<p>Based on the Superior Iron Man comic series with twists thrown in. You don't need to have read the comics to read. Blend of Comic and Cinematic canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Superior

“How we looking on time, JARVIS?”

“ _37 hours 48 minutes and 12 seconds, sir.”_

Steve hummed once to himself as he stirred the sizzling pan in his hand with a wooden spoon, lost in thought. 38 hours wasn’t the worst, it had been far worse on several occasions, probably more often than not as recently as last year. But still, it wasn’t quite up to his own standards, and he’d made him swear up and down he’d listen to him on this.

“Anything with the potential to blow up if it’s interrupted?”

“ _In sir’s hands, almost anything can have the potential to blow up._ ” Steve chuckled. “ _But not as such, no. He could stand to be interrupted.”_

“Thank you,” Steve said, reaching for a dish as he decided the stir-fry was done. The contents spread out in the bowl with a waft of delicious smelling steam, and it was enough to make his stomach growl. Tony wouldn’t notice if he took ten extra minutes to eat his own portion now, surely…

But no, he had to wait for Tony. He would just have to content himself with wistfully looking at the dishes even as he finished prepping them, sliding in forks and topping them with an extra bit of cilantro. He’d gotten a lot better about cooking in the years it had been since he came out of the ice, so much so that even Tony was appreciating his health food now, eating them with only mild to no complaint. He felt particularly proud of this one, the bowls in his hands as he made for the elevator taunting him and making his mouth water.

“JARVIS, would you mind?”

“ _Of course, sir.”_ The doors slid open, and Steve stepped in the lift, the button for the Avengers Lab Tony was currently in lighting up and sending him on his way without his needing to push it.

Tony had been down there for the better part of 30 hours, sans food let alone sleep. Somehow it had become Steve’s job to make sure Tony was actually getting the rest he needed, not that he minded. Tony might be grumpy about it, might put up a show of a fight, but he always melted right into Steve’s arms and curled up in bed with him without much complaint, and frankly Steve missed him if he was away for too long. Even a genius needs to recharge, as he told him frequently.

When the doors opened to the lab, Steve was met with chatter, a sign Tony was working, but not with 100% of his attention which is when he knew better than to disturb him. It brought a small smile to his face, stepping out and onto the linoleum floor, hearing Tony’s deadpan voice go on and on with a combination of references and science, both of which he wasn’t necessarily going to understand.

“…..nestly, in order for this to work it needs to be entirely psionic. Perfected. Button-clicking defeats the purpose.”

“Sure.”

“Two-fold brain synchronization, Beta waves and cerebellum calibration. That someone else in the vicinity would even come close to matching my specific output is statistically insignificant.”

“Uh-huh,” came another voice, tired and disinterested, and Steve glanced over to see Bruce sitting down at a table with one pen in his hand and another forgotten behind his ear. He knew that tone all too well. It was the sound of ‘Tony needs to feel like someone is listening, but as he doesn’t really want actual input, listening itself is unnecessary. Just make noises every now and again.’

He’d made that sound plenty of times.

 “Incoming,” Steve hummed, announcing himself as he casually walked up a few feet behind Tony. “So focused you couldn’t even greet me. That’s rude.”

“If I did, I might have spilled molten metal all over the floor,” Tony said, and sure enough, his hand was outstretched over a large tank of silver liquid, churning and bubbling away. As Tony stood there looking at it, it lifted itself out unsupported, forming a bubble around his hand in the shape of a hyper-inflated latex glove, nothing touching his bare skin yet. As if showing off, Tony quickly withdrew his hand, letting the metal slosh back into its own pool, stilling to a placid surface rather quickly after he pulled away from it.

“That sounds a lot like an excuse,” Steve tutted, raising an eyebrow as Tony turned around to face him, watching his eyes flit from Steve’s face to the bowls in his hands.

“Ah, Steve, my beloved, light of my life, sun and my stars, it is wonderful to see you. Can I have some of that.”

“So sincere,” Steve snorted, allowing Tony to reach out and take one of them from his hands. “You’ll have to owe me a better greeting than that.”

“Hello, Steve,” Bruce’s voice piped up from the desk, and Steve turned to smile and greet him properly as well.

“Evening, Bruce.”

“Is it really evening already?” Bruce blinked and squinted at the computer nearest him, and groaned and scrubbed a hand over his face underneath his glasses. “Another day gone…”

Tony wandered closer to Bruce to use his desk as a place to set his bowl down, and Steve followed after him. Once he was close enough, he saw Bruce himself didn’t look so good either. “… When was the last time you ate,” he asked, disapproval in his tone as his natural mother-hen instincts took over. The ever-present bags under his eyes looked extra pronounced.

“…. Yester….Two days? I dunno, it all blurs,” he shrugged one shoulder, eyeing Tony’s bowl of food with jealousy.

Giving his own a longing look, Steve held it out for Bruce instead. “Eat. Then sleep after.”

Gratefully accepting, Bruce took the bowl and inhaled the vegetable and peanut sauce smell, and dug right in. Steve, now without anything in his hands, stepped behind Tony to wrap his arms low around his waist and settle his head on his shoulder.

“You geniuses will be the death of me you know,” he said, voice quiet as he was so close to Tony’s ear. Tony, who had been eating with gusto, slowed himself and tilted his head toward Steve’s in gentle affection.

“That loses some of its threat when you’re saying it every other week.”

“I’d say it less if it were getting less true. I have to be on you about the necessities of eating and sleeping constantly for some reason. May I remind you that I’m your boyfriend, not your mother.”

“Best boyfriend ever,” Bruce all but moaned around the food, and Steve snorted.

“You’re welcome. That was mine, too. You have to owe me a thermos of Darjeeling.”

“Done.”

“Does this mean you’ll be having that leftover chocolate cheesecake for dinner we’ve been saving in our room?” Tony turned his head, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Don’t tell Steve, you know how crazy he gets about eating healthy,” Steve teased, squeezing his arms around Tony gently.

Tony smirked lightly, winding the noodles around his fork and spearing a bit of broccoli and offering it blindly to Steve’s mouth by his shoulder.

“Mm, what are you working on over there, by the way?” Steve managed to ask before he caved in and accepted the food, lifting his head as he did to look over at the innocent looking vat of metal.

“Endo-sym armour,” Tony hummed, looking over at it as well and twisting the fork in his fingers as he did when he was thinking. “An idea I came up with after one of the stories Parker told about his fights. He’s still so proud of all of them, it’s rather adorable. Plucky little punk. Anyway. When it’s done, it’ll be a liquid armor that completely hardens on contact. Strong as all my other armours, and will form around me without the need for a landing station to put it together. Pretty darn handy.”

“I’ll say,” Steve hummed appreciatively, but began to frown after a moment. “What makes it stick together and cling like that?”

“Oh, well,” Tony sounded almost a little sheepish, and Steve caught Bruce looking disapproving out of the corner of his eye. “I might have had Peter bring me back a sample after his little run in.”

“A sample of what.” Steve’s appreciation had turned to one of suspicion – Tony was always unabashed about his operations, except when it was potentially dangerous and he was hiding it from Steve.

“…. It’s two birds with one stone, really. Helpful in two departments. And takes a bit of threat away from Peter, so when you think about it it’s closer to three birds, or at least two and a half-“

“Tony.”

“…. It’s a sample of Symbiote. I examined it and did my best to recreate the properties, though without much prodding I got its cooperation.”

“You say that like a ‘symbiote’ has a degree of will.” Steve’s tone was definitely suspicious now, and he was looking at Tony’s profile with narrowed eyes. Tony, clearly, was deliberately not meeting his eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s an, uh, alien species of some kind,” Bruce’s voice spoke up again, and Steve turned his disapproving ‘did you know about this’ look on him instead. “More closely resembling parasites than anything else.”

“Parasites. That sounds like a wonderful material to build a suit out of.”

Tony huffed, and stepped out of Steve’s arms, setting the bowl down to defend himself properly. “I needed to conduct research on alien life of any kind anyway, and after talking with Parker that’s what we decided the gooey bit left over from his fight with Brock must be from its properties. It acts more like a costume than anything else, going from gelatinous alien vomit to a fully functional suit in the span of a few seconds. So yeah, I might have researched its properties and included them into my design. It’s safe, not like I actually _used_ the alien whatever. Just what it does. Because it was handy.”

“…. Uh-huh.” Steve pressed his lips together, and glanced back over to the vat again. He didn’t get a good feeling from it, the look of it alone was somewhat foreboding, even disregarding the obvious red flag of having used research conducted on an unknown alien species as its untested base. The whole of it made his neck prickle.

But if there was one thing he knew, it was that Tony Stark was a very, _very_ stubborn man.

“…. You’re going to do full safety diagnostics and tests before you take it out, right?”

Tony’s lips twitched, and he hummed noncommittally. “Yes, boyfriend-not-mother. It will be fine. And _fine,_ you’ll agree when you see. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but this might be the sexiest suit I have come up with,” he smirked, stepping toward Steve again to put a hand on his waist.

“We’ll have to see, you’ve already set a high bar for that,” Steve agreed, ready to let his mothering go now in favour of flirtation. “Though I prefer when the faceplate is up,” he mused, a hand moving up to move some of Tony’s hair from his forehead, and also to get an unobstructed look at his face.

“Love looking at my face that much, do you.” Tony’s hand at his waist was snaking around to his lower back instead, pulling him closer.

“Who wouldn’t. Though I admit a certain bias for it. And put your face together with your suits, well. What’s the saying? The men love a man in armour?” He let his hair laze back into his forehead as his fingers ran through the styled black locks instead.

“I believe the expression is ‘a man in uniform,’ soldier.” Tony’s other hand had somehow made it to Steve’s pants without his noticing, hooking a finger in a belt loop and tugging once suggestively as he playfully bit his lip at him.

“Guys. Still here,” Bruce said with a tired voice.

“No one’s keeping you,” Tony said airily, not even looking at him as the hand at Steve’s pants lifted to cup his neck instead. “You’ll be allowed to stay. But watching is at least $10.”

“I’m worth $20, minimum,” Steve teased, and they had the same idea at the same time, because Tony tugged his neck while Steve willingly leaned down and stole his lips in a kiss.

Bruce groaned and Steve could hear his rolling chair’s wheels push back and footsteps walk away, but he was hardly paying attention. He was much too busy winding his arms around Tony’s body and giving in to a familiar but no less wonderful kiss.

 

 

***

 

 

The taste of metallic blood in his mouth was growing rather annoying.

This fight had been going on for considerably longer than he would have thought possible, given that it was himself and Thor versus a magic pair of boobs and biceps with an axe. She was throwing magic bolts and hovering in the air, he was waving his axe around and throwing it at Thor like he wasn’t about to hit it hard out of the way with Mjolnir, and he could shoot repulsers and fucking _fly._ So why this fight to rescue Jane Foster from an almost BDSM restraint was taking longer than about twenty minutes was beyond him.

He swooped down into them again, attempting to get close to the blonde woman, firing blast after blast around her feet as she had some sort of protection going on around her levitating body. Anything to get her attention away from Thor, who by the sound of his large-lunged grunts was having difficulty beating away the onslaught by the much larger man, even with the use of his hammer.

The concrete steps beneath her cracked, and sure enough she whipped up to look at him, landing carefully in the bits of fractured flooring. “Don’t you have any other tricks at your disposal,” she taunted, leaping backwards with very much non-Earth gravity and balance to give herself room as Tony landed where she had been standing.

“You know, I was about to ask you the same question.” He raised both hands, firing both at once on her even as she again danced out of the way, hiding behind another large pillar outside of the building. His shot left a dark scorch mark on the brick.

“Funny you should say,” she giggled, and stepped out behind a pillar several to the right of the one he just saw her duck behind, and the moment he turned his attention to that one, four more stepped out into the sunlight, giggling at him. “I always have plenty of tricks.”

“Goddamn it,” he cursed, lifting into the air again in hopes of maybe being able to discern which was which.

“Stark!”

Tony’s head snapped to the side, looking to see Thor struggling but holding his own, landing a devastating blow to the man’s skull with a sickening crack. It wasn’t he that called to him, he realized a fraction of a second too late. The woman’s blast hit him, and the beeps went off in the suit almost immediately.

“ _Sir, you’ve lost propulsion capability in your left boot_ ,” JARVIS said cooly as ever, but Tony barely heard him over his own curse as he was struggling to remain balanced and airborne. “ _Functionality at 60%._ ”

“Yes, thank you,” Tony said bitterly under his breath, licking his teeth to clear away some of the blood that he desperately wanted to raise his faceplate so he could spit out.

The increasingly annoying giggle had his attention again, and he landed shakily, taking a step back to steady himself as the woman seemed to disappear from all five locations at once. He _so_ did not have time for this.

His hands were raised offensively as he looked around for her, clipped to the ground and unable to fly was incredibly frustrating. Tony took steps toward Thor, firing on his assailant in an attempt to make a dent in the action or somehow mercifully knock him out of the equation. Thor knew a heck of a lot more about his own people than he did, and judging by how similar this woman fought to Loki, he had reason to believe Thor would have some sort of tactic for something like this. Because right now he was up shit creek.

Tony hit the man in the ear and he yelled in pain, swinging his arm with the axe wildly in his direction. His armour was built to withstand the blasts of a lot of things. Apparently Asgardian weaponry was not one of them.

An explosion of pain burst in his mind, and he was knocked down to one knee as he heard a very faint clattering sound of metal on concrete. His faceplate was knocked away, and he let out an exhale as he let the blood in his mouth drip down onto the white ground beneath him, scrambling to find his bearings.

The momentary attack on Tony must have distracted the man enough for Thor to roar, electricity crackling around him and the hammer both as they knocked into the man’s skull, leaving him broken and motionless on the ground.

Thor was breathing heavy, Tony could tell from here, though with the tinnitus ringing his ears and the black spots in his vision, he couldn’t quite tell if he was speaking or not.

“I’m—No, I’m fine, go. Go get her,” he said on autopilot, thinking that must be the correct response to whatever it was his lips were moving and trying to communicate to him. Thor didn’t waste another second, running at top speed away to rescue Jane, tied like a sacrifice to the top of the court building they just destroyed the outside of.

“….JARVIS… Can you—“

He was cut off, a blast to the back of his still-covered head spreading the blackness around his vision and cutting him off mid-sentence. A fish-net clad leg in heels touched down in his periphery (what was left of it), clicking as its owner walked into sight, giggling.

“A shame Skurge had to forfeit. I had so much more I wanted to do to you, darling.”

Anger flooded Tony’s senses more than anything else, and without his screens in front of him he had to blindly guess as to the current state of his depleting armour, what was working and where. He anchored his legs on the balls of his feet, ready to give it a blind test.

“Sorry to tell you,” he said, activating the propulser in his right boot to give him just the amount of momentum he needed to knock into her and use his weight to pin her down to the cement. She grunted in pain, and lifted a hand to attack or manipulate him in some way, but he grasped it tightly in his left glove. “Play time’s over. We’re done here.”

“Oh, my sweet man of armour,” she all but purred, her dark eyes disturbingly mischievous. “Playtime is only beginning. You’re much like me, I can tell. You enjoy frustrating and toying with others for your own gain. Well,” and she lifted a hand to her lips, even as he held up his own hand and arming it threateningly with a high pitched technological whirr. She merely kissed her fingertips, and blew the kiss at Tony’s bare face. “Have fun,” she giggled.

All at once, Tony could feel himself slipping backwards into himself, unsteady on his own knees. He heard Thor’s voice shout ‘Stark!’ in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure if it was real or an illusion made by the woman beneath him. The woman who, now that he glanced down through the slow-motion way he was currently experiencing the world, was fading out of existence, leaving behind only concrete for his own blood to drip onto.

He wondered how close the nearest hospital was. And everything went black as his face hit the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> The Woman is Enchantress, and the Man is Skurge, The Executioner.
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr at supersecretkingbouquet.


End file.
